This post is about the world debut of Gross National Happiness measures, or GNH, to take the place of those tired Gross National Product figures, or GNP.
GNP is used to monitor manufacturing economy activity in industrial societies but includes financial gains. GNP led to managing of countries using information that has horribly distorted the overall picture. And bear in mind that all forms of ignorance are unnecessary.
Perhaps now that rich donors have a complete stranglehold on what is taught under the term, economics, in universities, and the credibility of economics grads is at an all-time low, it's time to allow economic academics to briefly give up on ignorance and recognize the obvious.
Our academics appear to be adopting new sets of indicators that look at fulfillment. But this could be some of that ol' time tokenism. Tokenism is the best way to suppress true reform and prevent our chances of adapting to reality. You simply ensure that you can say, "Oh, we already have a department in place that's in charge of that. (But we don't listen to what they say, and we don't give them money so they won't threaten the existing system which, let's face it, our donors ensure we continue to do well within.)"
But something really is going on.
The French government began publishing happiness indicators in
2009.
The Office for National Statistics in the UK has a program in place to
measure national well-being at the same time that prime minister, Cameron, is touring East Asia to promote sales of weapons made in the UK.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, is drawing
up guidelines for members (mostly finance ministers of 'developed countries') to collect “well-being data”.
Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics, is drawing up measures of “subjective well-being”. His
group is financed by the Obama administration. (We might wonder, "When is well-being not subjective?" So look for answers, coming soon.)
The first World Happiness Report was published recently, commissioned for a United Nations Conference on Happiness, under the
auspices of the UN General Assembly. There's input from Columbia
University’s Earth Institute, and two happiness experts, Richard Layard of the
London School of Economics and John Helliwell of the University of
British Columbia.
The happiest
people are in countries in northern Europe:
Denmark,
Norway,
Finland,
Netherlands.
Countries with the most misery are on the African continent:
Togo,
Benin,
Central
African Republic,
Sierra Leone.
At the UN Headquarters in New York
City on April 2, 2012 the
country of Bhutan hosted 600 participants from governments, academia,
civil society and religious bodies. The conference focused on Bhutan's new economic
paradigm.
Prime Minister of Bhutan, Jigmi Y. Thinley:
"It is now the intention of the meeting on April 2, (2012) to bring together
people from around the world – ... we are looking at
the launching of the initiative for the creation of a
sustainability-based paradigm comprising of, basically, four dimensions.
These are:
- well-being and happiness;
- ecological sustainability;
- fair distribution; and
- efficient use of the
increasingly scarce resources."
The conference outcomes will inform negotiations
related to Rio+20, the global conference on sustainable development in June of 2012. Bhutan will present the revised plan.
Bhutan is a Himalayan kingdom. But it's no Shangri-La. There's wealth and then some estimates peg a quarter of the
population of 700,000 as living on less than US$1.25 a day. 70 percent of the
population is without electricity.
It's a
country which experiences large, ongoing problems with Nepalese
migrants. It borders on Assam (India) where there is political unrest,
and Tibet, which was violently reabsorbed into China. So the country
remains rocky in more ways than one.
And
in 2014, Bhutan will go further and hold a conference at home aimed at
developing a
new GNH-based agreement equivalent to the Bretton Woods Agreement to
establish post- WWII global economic controls. See previous blog post
for the significance of the Bretton Woods Agreement and why it fell
apart.
Note: Coverage of Bhutan's conference at the UN was also given by:
as well as Canada’s CBC and Global News, plus Le Monde, and Time.
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